Gay Phoenix

by Michael Innes

  ‘Are there to be any other members of the family around?’ Appleby asked.

  ‘I haven’t heard, but rather imagine not. Mr Povey is said to have had a younger brother, who was unhappily drowned. I haven’t heard anything of other relations.’

  ‘And you haven’t yet met the chap himself?’

  ‘Not yet. In my position, you know, one must not be precipitate. Newcomers may resent the suggestion that their spiritual needs are at all urgent. Such matters, they are apt to feel, will keep. The shooting, the plumbing, the establishing themselves in the best available society: these are commonly felt to have priority. So I bide my time. If, as I greatly hope, this Mr Povey is an active churchman, he will no doubt take an early opportunity to intimate the fact. In that event, we might get things going with a little dinner party, to which I should beg Lady Appleby and yourself to come. There would be the Bishop and the Archdeacon, naturally, since the man must be regarded as a considerable landowner. But I can promise you no positively overpowering preponderance of the cloth.’

  ‘That would be delightful,’ Judith said firmly, and Appleby remembered to produce a vigorous confirmatory nod. But then he recalled something else.

  ‘Charles Povey!’ he said. ‘But of course. The name rings a bell. One reads about him from time to time. And if what the journalists say is true, Vicar, the chances of your dinner party mayn’t be too good. He’s a tycoon, sure enough, but he goes in for managing things by remote control. One hears of extreme instances of that, doesn’t one? Millionaires who haven’t been glimpsed for years, and so on. Rather fashionable form of plutocratic arrogance or diffidence or guilt-feeling or Lord knows what. I’ve an idea your chap has been drifting that way. So perhaps he has come to Brockholes to go to earth, as it were. The name of the place sounds just right for a recluse.’

  ‘Nonsense!’ Judith said briskly. A certain note of hope in her husband’s voice hadn’t escaped her. ‘Badgers are sociable creatures. They live in communities. Perhaps this Mr Povey is going to set up a community. Brockholes is certainly large enough for it.’

  ‘Transcendental Meditation – or something of that sort?’ The Vicar, who knew that Appleby, despite much faithful reading of the lessons at matins, was as unregenerate as anybody in his parish, was quick to get in a little frivolity first. ‘A rival concern just over the hill, would you say? Prayer wheels and joss sticks going like mad all day. However, we must welcome wholesome competition. Interesting word, Joss. Means a Chinese idol, and comes to us from Portugal. But it’s good Latin before that – and nothing more or less than Deus, my dear Appleby. So one might say – from another point of view, you know – that the Blessed Rood is a joss stick. A curious thought.’

  Appleby agreed that it was a curious thought. Dr Dunton’s line as a learned Peacockian clergyman, although a familiar turn during these tea-drinkings at Dream, always pleased him. He signified this by offering the Vicar another slice of cake.

  ‘We must put this chap Povey’s temperament to the test,’ Appleby continued. ‘He may be thoroughly genial and clubbable and convivial and all the rest of it, after all. If you feel that you can’t yourself at the moment call and leave a little tract–’

  ‘Really, John!’ Lady Appleby said.

  ‘Sir John is only quoting rather a striking poem,’ Dr Dunton said comfortably. ‘The shivering Chaplain robed in white, the Sheriff stern with gloom. But do you mean, my dear Appleby, that you’re game to call on him yourself?’

  ‘Why not? I ought to, come to think of it. Presumably there’s no Mrs Povey, so I can’t send Judith. And a stray patch of our ground – Judith’s ground – runs along with his. It will be a proper civility.’

  ‘But not while the man’s still unpacking his furniture,’ Judith said. She distrusted her husband when seeming to propose punctilious social courses.

  ‘Lord, yes – if it’s in a sufficiently casual way. I’ll go and shoot one of his badgers – rabbits, I mean – and then drift in to apologize. Round about eleven tomorrow morning. He can’t well do less than offer me a glass of Madeira. And then we’ll send the aged Hoobin – our sole but respectable retainer, Dunton – over with a brace of our own pheasants.’

  ‘We haven’t any pheasants,’ Judith said. ‘And this, as it happens, is the month of June. St Alban, St Barnabas, and Edward King and Martyr. The sad fact is, Dr Dunton, that John has too little to do. Hoobin grows more and more tyrannical, and drives him from the garden as with a fiery sword. So he must propose to go and badger Warren Hastings.’

  ‘Just right to badger at Brockholes,’ Appleby said brilliantly, and was gratified by a responsive chuckle from his guest. ‘And do you know what I’ll do, Dunton? I’ll say, as I leave, “By the way, we have a very good Vicar here.” That’s a perfectly proper remark. And it may set the ball rolling.’

  Judith Appleby sighed, and replenished the teapot from the hot-water jug. She knew that here was a lost cause.

  On the following day Appleby came home just before lunch. Whether he had in fact shot a rabbit was obscure. But he had to admit failing to meet Mr Charles Povey.

  ‘They told me he’d gone to town,’ he explained to Judith. ‘I wasn’t surprised. Brockholes is a place to escape from, just at the moment. The chap seems to have moved in there in a hurry, and there are still workmen doing everything under the sun. And furniture being unpacked, just as you said.’

  ‘What kind of furniture?’

  ‘What kind? Why, just the usual sort of stuff.’

  ‘Don’t be absurd, John. Nothing is more diagnostic than people’s furniture. And you can describe it if you want to.’

  ‘Perfectly true – so I can. There was a Hepplewhite tambour writing table, and an Adam sofa with absurd sphinxes, and some knife cases pretending to be funerary urns, and rather an attractive gouty stool–’

  ‘Being moved in? I wonder where they came from.’

  ‘Oh, Sotheby’s, I expect.’

  ‘I don’t see how you could know that.’

  ‘Neither do I, quite. But they had an aura of the saleroom, you might say. I’ve a feeling that this Povey is setting himself up in a new way of life. And, of course, Brockholes has been a mere barn. It would have to be furnished again from dot. Do you think it had remained untenanted in the possession of this family of Poveys?’

  ‘I’ve no idea. Did you manage to talk to anybody?’

  ‘Of course I did.’

  Judith, who had finished lunch, got up, walked to a window, and surveyed the modest garden, orchard and paddock of Long Dream Manor. Everything was in admirable order. And it wasn’t really true that Hoobin declined the assistance of his employer – or of anybody else whom he could get to work for him. His nephew Solo – who must have been the son of a brother’s extreme old age – had been cunningly insinuated into something like full-time employment with the Applebys, and was at this moment to be observed, as he commonly was, resting between one labour and another. It might be calculated that Hoobin and Solo did one half of the work, and that John – assisted by sundry young Applebys when they happened to turn up – did the other. It didn’t prevent John from being sporadically restless in these years of his retirement. Nothing but time on his hands, clearly, had taken him pottering over to Brockholes Abbey.

  ‘Who was it?’ Judith asked.

  ‘That I talked to? Oh, a factotum. I can’t think of a better description. A fellow of the name of Bread.’

  ‘An unassuming name.’

  ‘He seemed aware of it. “Bread’s my name but cake’s my nature,” he said. Quite a wag.’

  ‘Did you feel cake was his nature?’

  ‘It’s an interesting question.’ Appleby appeared to take this problem quite seriously. ‘Nothing rich about him. But just a hint of something unexplored inside. No, more than just a hint. He described himself as Povey’s secretary. I thought it odd th
at a secretary called Bread should make a joke about cake. And one felt he must have made it before. Rather stale cake.’

  ‘Jokes all round,’ Judith said – and felt that all this endeavour to extract interest from a man called Bread was another sign that John was still restive at having been put out to grass. Not that he had been, really. He’d asked for his cards before he need have, declaring that running the Metropolitan Police had bored him – even at £14,000 a year. And now here he was, preparing to talk nonsense about some newcomers at Brockholes. ‘Was anything else odd about him?’ Judith asked patiently.

  ‘Well, you know, it’s part of the job of a tycoon’s secretary to get rid of people. It’s his instinct, you may say. And here was an elderly gentleman patently shoving in out of the most idle curiosity. He must have felt that – just as you do.’

  ‘So I do. But go on.’

  ‘He chatted me up. Walked me round the place, and was extremely communicative. Incidentally, he offered me that glass of Madeira.’

  ‘Which you politely declined.’

  ‘So I did.’ Appleby seemed surprised. ‘But how did you know?’

  ‘My dear John, all those years as a policeman have endowed you with a strong hierarchical sense. There isn’t a more orthodox Establishment character in England. You must have felt that a tycoon’s pukka secretary is perfectly entitled to offer you a drink. But you declined one. Ergo, you felt he was assuming the role without the proper credentials, however he was representing them. That he wasn’t a secretary – or not of the sort he was claiming to be. The wrong tie. Or the wrong accent.’

  ‘Judith, you’re a perfectly horrible woman. And what you say is essentially accurate, as far as it goes. But there’s a little more to it. Bread’s a crook.’

  ‘Oh, dear!’

  ‘No, I’m not imagining things. Quite enough real crooks around, without having to dream them up. Bread has a beard.’

  ‘A beard? A kind of barley bread, I suppose.’ Judith made a gesture of despair. ‘All sorts of people wear beards nowadays. Our own son Bobby, for instance. And Bobby’s not a crook. He’s a perfectly respectable rising novelist. Even novelists can be persons of perfectly impeccable life.’

  ‘True, Judith, true. But beards, you see, always suggest to me – through long professional habit – the possibility of hastily assumed disguise. I have the trick of looking not at beards but through them. I strip bearded characters of their beards at sight. A straight habit of the imagination. Just as a dirty old man–’

  ‘Yes, of course. So you stripped Bread of his beard. Just what charms were then revealed?’

  ‘But seriously, Judith. I just wouldn’t have looked at the man, except for his beard. But I did. And I realized I’d seen him before.’

  ‘Well, that’s a different matter, I admit.’ Judith had begun to be impressed. ‘Just where had you seen him before?’

  ‘I haven’t a clue. It’s most annoying. At the Old Bailey, perhaps.’

  ‘In the dock?’

  ‘Certainly not on the bench or at the bar.’

  ‘So where do we go from here?’

  ‘Oh, nowhere at all.’ Appleby suddenly assumed a large lack of interest in the mysterious Bread. ‘If a tycoon chooses to employ a shady character as his secretary it’s no business of ours. Absolutely not.’

  ‘Absolutely and definitely not.’ Judith wasn’t impressed. ‘Bread rang some bell with you. Do you think you rang a bell with him?’

  ‘My name might. Of course I had to give my name. That’s quite possible, and might explain his doing such a lot of talking.’

  ‘Was it just general polite chat?’

  ‘Not in the least. It was a kind of orientation course in the character and habits of his employer. Don’t you think that was odd?’

  ‘Far from it. He wasn’t seeing you as a policeman, obscurely evoking his criminal past. He was merely seeing you as his boss’ new neighbour, harmlessly curious as to what’s cooking up at Brockholes. And he was putting you in the picture, simply in the interest of cordial future relations. But just what was the picture like?’

  Appleby didn’t immediately reply to this question. He was filling his pipe in the deliberate fashion he was inclined to affect when giving time to ordering his ideas. He didn’t look much like a man continuing to discuss a topic of no interest to him. He had brought to a high state of development – Judith reflected – a strong natural aptitude for pouncing on puzzles and shaking them until their interlocked components fell apart. Dr Dunton had presented him with a new and shiny puzzle of this sort (not that anybody else would have seen it as a puzzle) and he had given it a preliminary shake or twist or twiddle that morning.

  ‘The picture,’ he said slowly, ‘wasn’t just of a tycoon. It was of an embarrassed tycoon. Financially embarrassed, I mean. Charles Povey has created – not inherited – some very large enterprises. But they’re not really his cup of tea. His true mind inclines to other and higher things. So they’ve been inclining of late to go more than a little wrong. I was given the notion of a kind of Antonio in The Merchant of Venice, with his argosies going down all over the Mediterranean. The poor chap is too retiring, you see; too much given to elevated thought. Transcendental Meditation, perhaps, just as our good Vicar proposed.’

  ‘It sounds the most awful nonsense.’

  ‘You’re right. It sounds the most awful nonsense. Or a confidential secretary’s admitting and obtruding it does. But the scene was well depicted, I’m bound to admit. Quite an able character, Mr Secretary Bread. Povey, being of an extremely retiring disposition, has left matters far too much in the hands of subordinates. There’s a popular view of him, Bread says, which the press has been building up, as a kind of all-powerful spider sitting in the centre of an immense web. It’s a piece of minor financial mythology which I happen to know is true. But it’s based on a misapprehension of Povey’s beautiful character. Such was Bread’s theme, copiously developed for the benefit of a total stranger paying a morning call. What do you make of it?’

  ‘It has the air of a defensive operation.’ Judith paused to consider this judgement. ‘There’s real trouble brewing, and entrenchments – psychological entrenchments, as it were – are being hastily dug.’

  ‘Yes. And there was another theme. Povey has had private troubles, shocks, traumatic experiences which have borne hard upon his sensitive nature. Hence his digging in – the entrenchment image again – at Brockholes. The world forgetting, by the world forgot. We mustn’t expect to see too much of him.’

  ‘Did Bread particularize – in this business of shocks, I mean?’

  ‘There was something about the brother – a deeply beloved younger brother – lost at sea. It was a horrible accident of some sort. Charles Povey witnessed it, and immediately on top of it came other hideous experiences. They have left him not always quite right in the head. There was a definite hint of that.’

  ‘I’m with you that it sounds odder and odder. Did Bread give any instances of how this distressing intermittent lunacy appears?’

  ‘He gave one instance, which doesn’t sound particularly lunatic at all. Povey bolts into yet deeper retirement from time to time. Goes off for a breather under an assumed name. Perfectly innocent and reasonable, that seems to me. But Bread is worried by it.’

  Appleby had joined Judith at the window, and was frowning slightly. But this expression of displeasure might have been occasioned merely by what he surveyed through the glass.

  ‘Really,’ he said, ‘Solo excels himself. He doesn’t do a stroke. It’s the burden of his early environment, I suppose. He’s been larruped around all through his boyhood. And now, because I won’t let Hoobin take a strap to him, the boy conceives himself arrived in the land of the lotus-eaters. Sleep after toil does greatly please. I positively believe he is capable of sleeping on his feet.’

  ‘D
oes it occur to you,’ Judith asked, ‘that what you’ve been in contact with is not so much Povey’s problems as Bread’s?’

  ‘Oh, decidedly. He’s beginning to organize resistance in a tight spot. Something like that. Trouble brewing, as you say. And he’s building up a coherent picture designed to forestall undesirable inferences. However, it’s absolutely no business of ours. I insist on that. I’m not going to be shoved into poking around in it.’

  ‘Of course not.’ Judith Appleby was just short of speechlessness before this monstrous perversion of the situation. ‘Why not go out and larrup Solo? It would come as a great surprise.’

  ‘I’m not interested in surprises. I cultivate roses. I’m not sure I don’t keep bees and play the fiddle, and I’m not sure I don’t feel a strong affinity with Solo. Cum dignitate otium. An expression in Cicero, if I remember rightly.’

  ‘Of all the barefaced–!’ Judith checked herself, since Mrs Colpoys, the Applebys’ housekeeper, had appeared to clear away the luncheon. ‘I’m going into Linger to shop,’ she said briskly. And she left her husband to his meditations.

  7

  Linger is a small market town disposed round a large market place. Its local paper, the Linger Weekly, is fond of styling it the metropolis of the vale – meaning that it draws upon the vigorous rural life of King’s Yatter, Abbot’s Yatter, Drool, Boxer’s Bottom, Sleeps Hill, Snarl, and Long Dream itself. Persons from all these subsidiary centres do their shopping there, reaching it either in private conveyances or ramshackle and wandering buses according to their means and station. Everything parks in the market place itself, observing or ignoring a system of white lines, very up-to-date in its time and still just distinguishable on the cobbles, invented by Judith Appleby’s deceased cousin, Everard Raven, barrister-at-law. The white lines radiate, like the spokes of a wheel, from a marble statue of the Queen-Empress executed by Everard’s uncle, Theodore Raven, and by him generously donated to the Urban District Council upon some Jubilee occasion. One of the more obscure pubs (which are numerous) calls itself the Raven Arms.